‘A look-back through time is always faulty. People project present-day realities on their memories.’
Illustration: Joanna Neborsky

He wore pinstripes and a wide 1970s tie. She wore a $53 department store dress picked out by her mother. There was no engagement ring, no gift registry, no official photographer or party planner. The guest list – immediate family and close friends only – topped out at 14 people, which was about what their mock Tudor starter home could comfortably hold.

About 200 people gathered at a friend’s house that afternoon to toast the newlyweds with smoked meats, champagne and a tiered wedding cake. Some people headed to an off-campus dive bar for dancing, and the festivities continued until a 4am call from the local drunk tank. The bride’s brother had been pulled over on a DUI while driving her yellow Fiat, according to the groom’s memoir.

And so began the most consequential marriage in US political history.

The union solemnized between Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton in the living room of their first home as a married couple in Fayetteville, Arkansas, on 11 October 1975, created a force that has dominated Democratic party and US presidential politics for more than a quarter of a century and propelled two middle-class Americans into the highest circles of global and corporate leadership.

The couple spent just over a year in the mock Tudor house that Bill bought to get Hillary to marry him – long enough for her to paint the kitchen cupboards a retina-burning orange and for him to botch a repair job on the fireplace.

But even in that first year of married life – the last before either was elected to office – Bill and Hillary were trying to figure out how to accommodate two highly ambitious personalities within one marriage, according to their friends from those days.

“He always knew he wanted to come back here and he made no bones about it. He wanted to come back here and help his state – and God knows it needed helping,” said Ann Henry who, with her husband Morriss, hosted the Clintons’ wedding reception at her house. “He had told all of us here about her. He told us: “She is so smart. She could do anything. She could be a US senator. She could be a governor. She could be anything she wanted to be. He recognised her and her abilities.”

Six months after their wedding, Bill decided to run for state attorney general, plotting election strategy around a table that was used more for board games than dinner parties, according to friends. Even then, they called it the war room.

By the end of 1976, after Bill Clinton’s election, they were on their way to Little Rock, a journey that would take the Clintons to their first stint in the White House.

For their baby boomer generation, they were the ultimate power couple. For Arkansans in the early 1970s, when women still needed a husband’s consent to get a car loan or credit card, they stood for a new way of negotiating work and marriage, one where wives matched their husbands for career and political ambitions. Hillary Rodham did not even take her husband’s name until 1982, when her husband who lost his bid for re-election as governor was trying to get back into power – that is when she began to go by Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Bill Clinton, in his speaking slot at the Democratic national convention in July, spun the story of his marriage as classic fairytale romance. “I met a girl,” he began, recounting his awe-struck state upon meeting Hillary Clinton in the Yale law library in 1971, and how he finally won her heart, asking three times for her hand in marriage before he got a yes.

The story as told by Bill Clinton, was said to be an attempt to “humanise” his wife, left out the messy real-life bits, as fairytales do, in his case the epic cheating and lying, the lacerating public humiliation that risked his presidency and smolders still in the background of Hillary’s presidential ambitions, fanned by the comments of internet trolls.

Clinton’s testimonial and his repeated assertions that she was “the best darn change-maker I have ever seen” did little to address the other questions about their extraordinary partnership, and really the ones that matter most: how did a formidable couple manage their respective ambitions?

It is easy to ask, as many do, whether Hillary Clinton would ever have had a shot at being the first female president if she wasn’t married to Bill Clinton, whether she exploited her position as first lady to jump on to a relatively safe New York Senate seat, and whether she once again used her husband’s connections to major donors and Democratic party grandees to fix the race against Bernie Sanders in her second run for the White House.

But maybe the real question is whether Bill Clinton, who had already lost one election by the time of his marriage, would have succeeded in becoming America’s youngest governor and one of the country’s most popular presidents without Hillary Clinton by his side? Maybe Bill Clinton held her back – and Hillary Clinton would have got there any way, or even sooner.

Those who befriended the young couple as they embarked on married life in the college town of Fayetteville, Arkansas, in the 1970s asked early versions of those same questions about balancing ambition within a marriage.

The friendships they made during that first year of married life were lasting. Morriss and Ann Henry, who hosted that wedding reception, were lawyers and had held public office, like the Clintons. They were in Philadelphia when Clinton formally accepted the nomination. So was Margaret Whillock, who was Hillary Clinton’s first guide to southern living. Diane Blair, a close confidante from those days, died of cancer in 2000, but she kept extensive notes of their conversations, which are housed in the University of Arkansas.

A look-back through time is always faulty. People project present-day realities – in this case Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee – on their memories. But when the friends first met in the 1970s, Bill and Hillary Clinton both seemed headed for prominent positions in public life. According to their friends, it was an open question who would get there first, and at what personal cost.

•••

It was a perfect fall day in the Ozarks – warm sun, cloudless blue sky, with a hint of coolness in the air, and the Razorbacks were playing a home game. Craig and Margaret Whillock’s house was just down the street from the law school where Bill and Hillary Clinton taught.

Craig Whillock, a former state representative and aide to a local member of Congress, had been one of Bill Clinton’s earliest mentors when he came back home to Arkansas.

When Bill Clinton announced he wanted to run for Congress, against a longtime Republican incumbent, Whillock ran up to get his contacts book, and drove the newcomer all over the district making introductions, according to his widow, Margaret.

The Whillocks often opened up their home to large football parties, and on one glorious afternoon in 1974, Margaret Whillock looked up to see Hillary Clinton at the back door.

Hillary’s pay records show a starting salary of $16,450 – slightly more than her husband who was on $16,182

“There was something about her that was so compelling,” Whillock said. “I saw her out of the kitchen door, framed in the door watching the crowd, and she had on a white dress and I thought: ‘She is going to be important to me’.”

The Whillocks were already playing surrogate parents to both Clintons. Bill Clinton regularly used to drop in for dinner with the family, on his way home from a teaching job at the law school. When Hillary Clinton decided to pay a visit and eventually take a job at the law school herself, Bill Clinton asked Margaret Whillock to show her around.

He was desperate for Hillary Clinton to like Arkansas, to like it enough to stay, Margaret Whillock said.

“Bill Clinton was so excited she was coming to Fayetteville. He was thrilled out of his mind. He wanted her to like it here. He wanted her to meet people. I think he realized what a jewel he had in her.”

Whillock was working full-time as a school teacher and she had six children at home. That did not deter Bill. “He said: ‘You have to have her over. You have to have her over,” she said.

So on Clinton’s second day of work at the law school, Whillock invited her for lunch and the women became friends.

Even then Hillary Clinton was a high-flyer – certainly in Arkansas where she was among the first women teaching in the law faculty, and a leader in expanding legal services to the poor – at a time when judges barred women from taking on rape cases on the grounds that they could not cope with the unpleasantness.

She was an ambitious, east coast liberal in a hurry in a small, southern town that operated at a slower, gentler pace, especially where gender roles were concerned. Women – if they did work outside the home – were mainly confined to feminine professions like teaching and nursing.

“She was different because she was interested in things,” Whillock said. “She did things differently. She wasn’t into going shopping too much and that kind of thing.”

Clinton was one of just 27 women in her graduating class at Yale law school. In Arkansas, there was an even bigger gender imbalance. She was among the first female professors at the law school, winning the job over 39 male and two other female applicants.

And she earned more than her husband from the very beginning of their marriage. Both were employed to teach at the University of Arkansas law school. Hillary’s pay records for the 1974-1975 academic year show a starting salary of $16,450 – slightly more than her husband, who was on $16,182 in his second year at the law school, and she would continue to outpace him on pay for her short time there.

She also had a broader portfolio of responsibilities, teaching criminal procedure and establishing a legal aid clinic, and she came with glowing recommendations from her professors and supervisors at her previous jobs.

By the end of that year, after Bill Clinton won his election as attorney general, the couple were on their way to Little Rock. Their lives as private citizens were over.

Hillary Clinton would face much closer scrutiny over her conduct as a wife: her decision to keep her last name, to hold down a demanding job, and to take on big policy projects, such as her successful overhaul of Arkansas’s public schools, which had been ranked worst in the country.

She saw even then the possibilities of using her position as the first lady of Arkansas to make change – if not always the perils, according to Henry, whose husband Morriss had served as a state senator.

“She was talking about Eleanor Roosevelt. That was her role model and mentor kind of thing,” Henry recalled. “I was saying sometimes you have to be careful and you can only do so much and then there is a backlash.”

Clinton disagreed, citing Roosevelt’s activism as first lady. “I said by the time Eleanor Roosevelt was so involved in politics, that marriage was all over and I am married with three children,” Henry said.

She was not clear whether Clinton really saw her point.

•••

Diane Blair was a prodigious taker of notes – on yellow legal pads, note paper with silly cartoons, and in typed records of hour-long phone conversations with Hillary Clinton when the then first lady was having some down time at Camp David.

Blair’s reflections on her close friend take up 16 boxes of her papers at the University of Arkansas – pages scrawled with references to Chelsea Clinton’s ballet lessons, the flannel nightgown Hillary Clinton wore in the living quarters, and other intimate details of her friend’s life in the White House.

But the essence boils down to this, Blair writes at one point, paraphrasing her friend: Bill Clinton was the duck. Hillary Clinton was the decoy. As the wife, Hillary Clinton was constantly under attack for exhibiting traits that might be admired in a man.

Her intelligence and tenacity – which would have been an asset in a man – made people uncomfortable, according to pollsters. She needed to project a softer side.

And Clinton told Blair, the White House operatives went along with that because it directed the criticism away from Bill Clinton.

Clinton was also getting tired of the criticism of her appearance. “I gave up my name, got contact lenses. But I’m not going to try to present to be someone that I’m not,” she told Blair.

“She has about come to the conclusion that no matter what she does is going to piss off some people, so will just continue to be herself and let everybody else make whatever adjustments they have to.”

From her privileged position as confidante, Blair also served as a sounding board for Clinton at the bleakest moments during her time as first lady, when she was confronted with her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.

It seems clear even then, when the humiliation was still fresh, that Clinton never seriously contemplated divorce. “He has been her best friend for 25 years, her husband for 23 years, they’re connected in every way imaginable, she feels strongly about him and family and Chelsea and marriage and she’s just got to try to work it through,” Blair wrote in her notes. “She is not trying to excuse him. It was a huge personal lapse. And she is not taking responsibility for it.”

Blair goes on to record Clinton’s efforts to rationalise her husband’s behaviour – because of the pressure he was under as president, his early upbringing, and to dismiss its importance.

Ultimately, Clinton forgave her husband. “She’s in it for long haul,” Blair wrote. “Because she’s stubborn; partly her upbringing; partly her pride – but, mostly because she knows who she is and what her values and priorities are and she’s straight with those – she really is OK.”

•••

Nine months later, in July 1999, Blair flew to DC for a visit, arriving at the White House to find Bill Clinton practicing his putting, and Hillary Clinton lounging by the pool.

That evening Blair found the couple in the solarium, with Bill Clinton helping Hillary Clinton with a speech – trying to make it punchier.

“It’s clear how much she values his advice and editorial skills,” Blair wrote. When Clinton came back from the event, she thanked her husband for his help.

Hillary Clinton’s second act had begun. She spent her final months as first lady launching her run for the Senate seat in New York. From here on, it would be Hillary Clinton’s ambitions taking center stage, and Bill Clinton offering back-up support.

And, the old Arkansas friends said, Bill Clinton was entirely fine with that. The admiration he had for Hillary Clinton all those years before was still alive, they insisted.

“The way he talks about her and the way she talks about him,” said Margaret Whillock, visited the family in Chappaqua when Clinton was in the Senate. “One time he said Hillary got this great new dress for the Met opening or something like that. He knew those things. He was glad. He was proud of her.”